The Envy, top of their line - is more gaming than business - but otherwise, the A T-Series ThinkPad will slam it down. But the addition of a SLOT load drive is a good move. The keyboard is still standard island type (yuck) and a glossy screen - which also sucks for serious users.

Geez, HP charges $120 to upgrade the 15" Envey from Win7 Home to Win7 Pro?!. Even if a ThinkPad comes with Win7 Home, they charge $30 to switch to Pro edition.. what a rip. $175 from the i5-430 to the i5-540 ugh!!

I configured the Envy against the ThinkPad T510 with the same stats as much as possible. (PS: HP configure system is a PAIN in the rear!)

I love my ThinkPad T400, but the closest ThinkPad to the Envy 14" (the T410) doesn't really compare. The NVS3100m graphics in the new T410 are barely faster than my three-generation-old Radeon HD 3870 T400, and way slower than the Radeon 5650 that's going to be in the Envy 14"

Then there's the fact that the Envy has a higher resolution screen (1600x900 instead of 1440x900), almost certainly better speakers (the T400's speakers are crappy and I've heard that the T410's aren't much better; the Envy supposedly has good speakers for a laptop), and the screen is almost certainly much better quality (it's hard to be any worse than the T410's screen).

On the plus side the T410 has hotswap optical drives (and you can add a hard drive, though not a battery like you can on my older T400), a docking station, and is probably better built.

Different laptops for different people. I love my T400 but I do wish I had something with more graphical pep. The Envy looks like a decent option.Reply

At my office, we have a T400/61 (same thing), so I know that notebook well. I'll agree with your that the T400 for some odd reason has the poorest ThinkPad screen I have ever seen, the colors are muted, but otherwise sharp.

I've compared side by side our many Thinkpads. T400s, T61 and T410. The T410 has a better screen than the T61, but its not quite as nice as the T400s. The T410's screen is brighter than my R61 (R500).

When you talk about the Envy kicking the T410's butt in the graphics department... you are not comparing apples to apples (heh).

The ENVY is a consumer -MacPro like notebook with a ATI 5830m Graphics... of course its going to murder any ThinkPad. Its a gaming GPU and I said that in my first post. For business use, the 5830 is not going to be used and would only drink more battery juice.

When I got my Thinkpad, I had a choice between another notebook with a gaming card... I choose the ThinkPad for the matte screen... I hate glossy screens. I paid the same price for my slower ThinkPad than if I went with a consumer glossy-screen low-end gaming notebook. I have my desktop for gaming. And rarely do I think "hmmm... a gaming GPU would be handy". I use my notebook for work or internet.

So the price difference is $300 less for a notebook with more details on WHATS inside and far more wireless options.Reply

The Envy's are consumer notebooks. If you want to compare the ThinkPad T- and W-series to something from HP, check out the EliteBook 8440p, 8440w, 8540p and 8540w. Customizing a notebook to meet the specs of another system that's on sale, will generally end up with a price in favour of the pre-configured system.

The ThinkPads will probably kick Envy down in terms of reliability, but if you're gonna game, a Mobility Radeon HD5850 is going to be a lot faster than a Quadro FX 880M.Reply

I think AMD might actually catch up to Intel in terms of batter life with their new mobile CPUs. GloFo's 45nm process is quite mature now and the TDPs of these new chips are comparable to Intel's. Now, I know TDP is not great indicators of power consumption, but it certainly gives me hope.Reply

Not from what I'm seeing... I'll have a review up in the near future, but M300 and M600 do better than the older CPUs, but still nowhere near the battery life that Intel gets. They can come close to Core 2 performance, but Core i3/i5 have now upped the ante. The M600 ends up about 10% slower in single core and 30% slower in multi-core compared to the i3-350M. AMD's HD 4200 still easily beats the Intel HD Graphics, but i3/i5 with a discrete GPU like the HD 4330 will still offer better battery life and performance. It's pretty bad when Intel can pair up a CPU with a discrete GPU and still use less power than AMD's CPUs with IGP.Reply

Hey, I like AMD in general myself. Sure their CPU's aren't as fast as the fastest i7 CPUs, but they are competitive. So spending $165 for an AMD quad-core that is about 10~20% slower than a $1000 i7... I'll pocket the extra $835 for other things. Myself and others enjoy our AMD systems, and I do own an intel quad as well as intel on my ThinkPad.... but when it comes to power usage, AMD is very very bad.

Anandtech did a review with two Compaq notebooks, a low end intel vs an AMD.. The results are typical. AMD had a much more powerful system, but the intel had much better battery and no gaming abilities.

The market is growing for low-power, performance systems and AMD needs to get its act together in that sector as well. Intel did a good move in making the ATOM... which is nothing more than a PIII CPU with some modernization and of course in a tiny package. AMD could take an OLD AMD-XP core, double the cores and use the smaller processes. But I don't know how well it can sip power.

After these past 10 years, AMD has never been aggressive with their mobile CPUs power usage.Reply

"I like AMD" WTF? That's fanboy language. Intel and AMD are both legally constructed artificial "persons" whose only motivation above self-preservation is profit. It's naive to think any corporation would not act to abuse a monopoly position given the chance.

Because they sell a slightly slower 6-core desktop CPU for a much cheaper and more reasonable price than Intel has no relevance at all to mobile CPUs where AMD gets comparatively terrible battery life even where they can match performance.

That you can barely find a laptop with an AMD CPU in it, and certainly none at a level over mid-range performance, indicates either:a) AMD's mobile CPUs are unable to compete on anything other than uber-low-end price;b) Intel are still paying OEMs not to use them...Reply

"That's fanboy language."... Huh? I said I liked AMD, I like the pricing on the product, I didn't say I wanted to marry them. AMD is a company, blah blah. I also buy Intel's SSD drives because (A) the perfomance (B) reliability and (C) price ratio is better than anything else on the market.

The rest of your post about the 6-core CPU, battery life, etc... Gee, didn't I pretty much say that?

The last line of my post was "After these past 10 years, AMD has never been aggressive with their mobile CPUs power usage." - its a fact, their CPUs aren't great for the mobile market. A fanboy would buy AMD Mobile just because its an AMD.

Fact, the notebook & netbook markets continues to grow and AMD is going to miss out and it will be mostly their fault. For a notebook, intel CPU is the way to go - and getting one with an ATi GPU is best of both worlds... oh, the Envy has such a set up.

If intel is still paying OEMs to not use AMD, then they are breaking the agreement from earlier this year and open themselves to another lawsuit. May intel lose more money.Reply

That 14" Envy - the right side. Why would they put the Kensington lock port smack dab in the middle like that? What if you're using an external mouse? The (stiff) cable is going to end up right where you're supposed to use your mouse. Same goes for the wired ethernet.

Furthermore, the power and HDD activity LEDs... why would HP put them there? I like to keep an eye on those LEDs from time to time.

They aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are trying to make a macbook. Silver body, black screen bezel, black chiclet keyboard, single surface trackpad/mouse. At my first quick glance, I actually thought the home page image was a macbook.Reply

It may be your opinion that it is a "copycat look" but It is not mine. The macbook pros completely lack color and finish which IMO one of there biggest downfalls, aside from their exorbitant pricing. HP offers greater performance, better looks and a lower price tag to boot. Reply

It's got a metal case (good for heat dissipation, and looks much nicer than flimsy plastic), it's got chicklet island keys (like a very large number of keyboards today), and it has a black bezel (like a significant number of other laptops). I have both laptops (Envy 15 and early 2009 unibody MBP) so am speaking a little bit from experience.

So does that them imply that all of the hundreds of other laptops that do that are copycats of the MBP? I don't know. The metal is very different than the MBP (and gives it a nice texture), the keys feel a little bit better than the Macbook Pro. The screen is much nicer than the MBP (higher resolution, and non-shiny). The trackpad is similar (I'll give you that), but if something works well, why not try to improve on it? The bezel is black, but so what? There were a lot of laptops before the MBP that had black bezels. E2E glass - I don't care about that - at least not with a matte screen. My Envy does not have e2e glass, so there's no comparison.

I don't think that it's a clone, so much as simply a "metal case modern laptop".Reply

During the first generation of the hp envy's several hp reps, and an official hp training were specifically comparing the hp envy to the macbook pros. The old envy 15 with the I7 option is faster than the 17 inch macbook pro, and the old envy 13 coupled with the LV processor with the second battery that latches onto the chasis gets better battery life than the macbook pro (for they are using two batteries) and it runs windows natively.Reply

Why would they try to hide the fact that they are making what is arguably a better notebook for the price? I would definitely purchase the Envy 14 over the 13 inch MBP. Moreso, I would think the Envy 14 will likely be a better buy than the 15 inch MBP.Reply

It bothers me a bit they only offer SSDs for the high end models, and then only x25-M 160GB.If i designed laptops, I'd insist any laptop released in 2010 with 15" screens or more would have 2 2,5" slots, and have 30-80GB SSDs optional as boot-drives for all models, with 40GB x25-V and 32GB Indilinx as recomended for lower end models, x25-M 80GB for middle range, and x25-M 80/160GB or SF-1200 50/100GB for higher end models, and the possibility for the buyer to specify other capacities for all models. After all, changing (or inserting) an SSD is not much work (can easily be done in the electronics store/etailer in a minute or two).I also have an issue with buying the laptops without OS (for a lower cost) not being an option for a lot of models.Reply

I'd like to see them ditch the optical drive on smaller models (14" and below,) possibly as an option, and include a second hard drive instead. An 80GB SSD with a mechanical hard drive of your choice would be fantastic.Reply

Curiously, the price that HP is offering for the high end SSD options on the Envy 15 is incredibly inexpensive. Going from the default drive (320 gig) to the 160gig SSD plus 250 gig harddrive is a stunningly inexpensive 320 dollars. That's less than you can get the X18 g2 Intel SSD's alone for anywhere (which is what's in the Envy 15). Newegg (at the time of this writing) sells them for 450 dollars (when they're in stock). So I'm not that disappointed in that option. Plus, the Envy is all about "top of the line consumer" brand for HP.

Doing a little bit more math, adding a small, "value" SSD for the OS partition will cost an additional 100 dollars (approximately). So for an extra 220 dollars, you'd get a substantially larger (and faster!) top of the line SSD. I'll spend the 220 for more convenience and faster performance.

The problem I see with the "tiny OS SSD" is that the OS is only one small part of the whole pie. Sure I can boot into the OS in no time at all, but if all of my very disk intensive apps are on a slower spindle drive, then what do I care? I want an SSD to be large enough to handle all of my applications, and a separate drive to handle the data. Which, with the current Envy 15, it does extremely well for a (IMO) very reasonable price.

Personally, I think they've made a great move with that upgrade option. Particularly given how much other manufacturers charge for inferior SSD's.Reply

AMD's website is.. completely lacking in specifics. And in the article you talk about how it's nice to see a lot of models using it... but what is it? If it's just a fancy way of branding "ATI video cards", then it's really boring, if nice to see laptops with real video cards. If it's something more specific like nVidia's optimus or hybrid crossfire, that would be nice to know too.Reply

AMD Vision is just a way of AMD letting the customer get an idea of how the laptop will perform. IE: vision premium will perform better than vision, while vision ultimate will perform better than premium. It is just referring to the performance level of the cpu/gpu.Reply

Those saying these are MBP copies are mistaken. I took a look at the photos expecting that and they aren't not even close to the Apple design ethos:

The excessive markings:printing on the lid and hand restsHP logo on lid and screen, and Envy logo, and that red thing on the front

Irregular form:irregular angles sides to top causing ports to bulge with sharp edges (flat top to large radius curve to small radius to small radius on body to large radius to small radius to gap to flat)bottom plate inset with big fit gaps

Irregular use of materials:plastic bottomaluminium body sides and magnesium topmagnesium lid in what appear to be two pieces

I could go on but I think I've made the point. There is no way that would leave Ive's studio knowing his passion for simplicity:

A MacBook is:one metalone colourone circular radiusflat plates

It is an exercise in the repetition of the minimum number of constituents. The radius of the corners is the same as the radius for the corners of the trackpad is the same as the radius at the corners of the keyboard.

Just the T printed on the HP trackpad would have Ive up at night fretting. HPs own logo would cause him angst. The LED in the trackpad? Where a finger could cover it? No, too busy.

Now, I'm not putting the HP down... make your own choice... I'm giving the HP designers more credit than others here. I think they know enough about design to understand that this is not built from MBP design cues.Reply

With what you said in regards to angles, and how the USB ports and other are in conflict with the rest of the angled body... I completely agree. Its a bit on the SLOPPY end, like they took the motherboard from another computer and stuck it in this body design (which is what most likely happened).

having the bottom curve into a smaller base, is a visual trick to make the notebook look thinner. Many companies do this... not a bad thing, but it looks stupid with the 90 degree angled ports.

Usually when this is done on Thinkpads, the flat-sides for ports are inset. On the latest T410, there are a few ports that go past the angled bottom, but no sharp edges or as bad looking as HP. They did this so the notebook gets its 4 USB ports, Display Port, VGA, eSATA. If Lenovo threw out the analog modem port, they could stick a USB & firewire in its place and at least have one side "perfect".Hey, lately Lenovo has been reducing the stickers on the bottom of the notebook and hiding the Windows Sticker inside the battery compartment (which also protects it) as well as others. Its always rather ugly to see a computer with 4-6 ugly stickers on the bottom or sides.

Keep in mind, its not impossible to copy the MacBookPro... that would be a legal problem. But I can see the elements where they copied the MBPro. The lowered keyboard, back-lit keys, etc.

BTW, top end Dell Precision notebooks look very much like ThinkPads, they even stick on a blue tracking-stick in the middle of the keyboard. The keyboard layout itself is old-style ThinkPad.Reply

I really, really hope you guys at Anandtech will take the time to review the HP Envy 14 when it launches (or hopefully before, if you can convince HP). The Envy 17 isn't that appealing.

Please, please tell me you plan to review it! This could make for a real Macbook Pro competitor, if HP has fixed the issues of the first two iterations of the Envy line (and the price is way down now).Reply